Paul Claudel, an Ambassador at the time, perceived the surrounding luxuriant nature to be hostile in the divine plan. He was taking stock of his life at fifty, mulling over the bitter and the sweet while revisiting his fundamentals: his conversion, the revelation of Rimbaud, the failure of his monastic vocation, the failure of his encounter with the “rose” on the boat to China, the abandonment of the child he fathered adulterously, the consent to marriage “over there” and to “these children I had in my dreams”.
But there is always the call of the sea, flight, exile and loneliness. The quest for an absolute between the poetic work and the Christian incarnation of the soul. His bitterness finds solace in a love that binds him to God, an exhortation to the celebration of the mass, which is his way of reaching God, an exaltation of the Eucharist, experienced in its intimate destitution and as a carnal, cannibal, almost orgiastic union, as well as in the droll and disenchanted verve of the gaze he brings to bear on his fellow men. A ritual to contain the inner disorder, a congestive, exacerbated Catholicism to ward off inner defeat, the temptation of “ending everything”. A soul in crisis, calling upon a silent God, discussing “man to man” with this Father who sends men to sacrifice (he was writing in 1917).

For me, this is not about subscribing to a profession of faith, but to a poetic and theatrical work that identifies with the line in Saint John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word”.

• Mesures sanitaires : le port du masque et la distanciation physique sont obligatoires. L'entrée de nos théâtres sera interdite aux personnes s'y refusant et les billets ne seront pas remboursés.

Compte tenu de l’instabilité du contexte sanitaire et des mesures relatives à l’accueil du public, nous mettrons en vente les spectacles au fur et à mesure de la saison.
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Concept and interpretation: Didier Sandre
Lighting: Bertrand Couderc
Original music: Othman Louati
Artistic collaboration: Éric Ruf